Black Mass

by John Gray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $24)

“Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion,” Gray, a British philosopher, insists in this outspoken attack on utopianism and the “faith-based violence” it has inspired. History, Gray writes, offers no new dawns or sharp breaks, and, from the French Revolution to the war on terror, he is as critical of the humanist belief in progress as of the “belligerent optimism” of neoconservatives. Sketching the roots of utopianism, he emphasizes the similarities between seemingly disparate movements: radical Islam, he suggests, might best be thought of as “Islamo-Jacobinism.” Taking the Iraq war as an object lesson, he argues for an acknowledgment that the “local pieties of Atlantic democracy” are not the only way to govern. Gray’s writing has a bracing clarity, but he tries to fit too much into his model of utopianism with too little argument. ♦